This thread is probably dead but I must say that the marketing people for MagicJack did a terrible job with those commercials. They make the product seem like a scam, which is why I wrote about them for Wisebread (http://www.wisebread.com/is-magicjack-a-scam).

But this seems to be one of those cases where the product actually delivers on its promise. It's a cheap way to make calls and that's all it is, which means it's great for a lot of people.

It's like the people that made their commercials are the same people behind the Snuggie ones, which in their case is brilliant because it's just a stupid blanket. But with a tech product like this...it doesn't work so well.

I consider phone service to be a life critical resource. I won't do anything that may result in me needing to place a 911 call at 3AM during a power failure and not getting dial tone. So far ONLY traditional land line works for that, at least in my area.

Cell phones work for many people, but coverage is so spotty where I live that I don't even bother turning my phone on at home (if I do, the battery dies in a few hours). And I have experienced power failures of > 2 days where the cell towers started to run out of diesel and go down. Landlines do not go down; they keep about a week worth of diesel on hand and even in extreme power failures, they will truck in diesel to keep the switching stations up.

I actually use Google Voice so I don't pay a dime even if I spend all day talking long distance (domestic) and if I ever called internationally, it's 1 or 2 cents a minute to most countries. But it uses my standard land line. Google Voice is kind of nice in that it gives me pretty much all the features I could ask on a bare-bones phone line - I don't even have to pay for caller ID, I pick up the phone and their computer tells me who's calling, and I press 1 to pick up and 2 to send them to voice mail (it'll go to voicemail on its own otherwise). Also I can see records of every inbound and outbound call, and they transcribe (speech to text) voicemails and email (or SMS) them to me.

You can use a combination of sipgate.com and google voice to produce a completely free phone service. http://lifehacker.com/#!5349506/make-free-voip-calls-from-google-voice

Sipgate is free for incoming calls. If you sign up for google voice and get the free phone number and then link it to your sipgate number people who call will be routed to your sipgate phone. Outgoing calls are made from google voice w/sipgate, call is initiated from google voice, forwards to your sipgate phone (which considers it an incoming call and is therefore free), you pick up your sipgate phone, and then call is forwared to party you actually want to talk to.

It's a little confusing, but once it's set up it works OK. I had problems with sipgate softphone on windows 7 and downloaded mizuphone light as a replacement software; however, the service remains through sipgate, it's just different software.

I've had a little trouble with this method, but it definitely works. The other sweet thing is that you can set up google's voicemail and have transcriptions of voicemail and text messages sent to your email.

I use Google Voice for my business lines and I bought this device from Obihai that allows me to use any landland handset. Everyone who uses the phone at the office thinks it's just a regular phone line. The box is $40 and the Google Voice service is free.

Apparently you can also set it up where if you're out of the country, you can make calls to the US for free.

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